Assessing the 'Agency Slack' of National Governments in Today's Politicized EU

The question of how member state governments aggregate domestic preferences when they develop their policy positions at the European level is crucial for understanding the drivers behind the trajectory of the EU. Yet existing research does not provide a consistent picture of how governments react to and work with specific domestic preference constellations. A considerable body of research emphasizes the centrality of voters for governments’ policy positions in today’s politicized EU (Cramme and Hobolt 2015; Copelovitch et al. 2016). However, there is also research stressing that governments are not passive processors of domestic preferences but strategic actors keen on preserving autonomy to leave a distinct mark on their country’s policy position (Mair 2007; White 2015; Cioffi and Dubin 2016; Moury and Standring 2017). To provide a clearer picture of this issue, this paper explores and systematizes the many strategies governments can apply to preserve ‘agency slack’. Governments can choose not to discuss EU topics in national and/or European elections (Schmidt 2006), muffle disagreement within their parties (Parsons and Weber 2011), or frame EU policy issues as technical (Parsons 2007). Governments can also apply emergency rhetoric (Séville 2017), moralize their policy position (Berry and Hay 2014), package reforms into smaller parts to avoid referendums (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Schimmelfennig 2015), or shift blame upwards to the EU (Cramme and Hobolt 2015). The paper categorizes those strategies using concepts from the literature on blame avoidance (Hinterleitner and Sager 2015, 2017) and formulates expectations about their applicability and about their success prospects. The second part of the paper illustrates how the application of these strategies conditions the impact of domestic preferences on policy positions, using key European policy issues between 2010 and 2016 as examples.